"Quality of Life in the Game Industry" white paper

[N3ur0n0saurusl2exs0r!!!]

Well I finally read it after having it handed to me by a previous GPG artist colleague and I must say it was an extremely vindicating and interesting read.

This was published by the International Game Developers Association where the full title of it was:

Quality of Life in the Game Industry: Challenges and Best Practices

You can download it after you become a member and give some very basic information here:

http://www.igda.org/qol


When I first got my hands on the paper I was amazed that someone had actually taken the time to put something like this together but after reading it I found that it took a lot of someones to put it together. Most directly though it was the result of eight experienced game developers although they surveyed nearly a thousand professionals in the industry...994 actually...in order to include some meaningful statistics as part of the paper.

So what did I think of the paper after completely reading through? Well actually it didn't take that much reading into it before I was totally amazed at the fact that so many of my own personal thoughts were not unique. So many of my own personal conclusions that I had independently arrived at after deculturizing myself from all those unhealthy proximally infectious deprecational, deleterious, and dellusional years at Gas Powered Games were major topics in this paper. These were conclusions that since the time I had spent away from the Gas Powered Games Cult were thoughts that became increasingly vivid as time went on eventually crystallizing into what was so obvious now that I couldn't completely understand why I couldn't see them back when I was working there. But it was actually pretty simple - it was dellusion based off of proximity. It's actually quite interesting to know now that I have completely recovered from all the brainwashing and have unlearned all the fucked up and stupid moronic lessons of working for a such a stupid yet brilliant fanatic as Chris Taylor was, that I am quite able to enlighten those who are still there - but they can't hear me... There is nothing I can say to them to get them to understand what the true reality is to their situation - they are completely deaf...nothing rings true to them from me. And there is nothing that I could say that would actually be something that would be considered as being a positive opinion to help their current situation that they are in. It is a company-wide dellsuion. A work ethic if you will that perpetuates itself through the company disguised as a form of pride taken in as an attitude that is meant to help the company but in reality it is hurting everything and everyone by destroying productivity and the quality of the project.

Really it all just comes down to realizing something that I have said so many times before that it is actually more productive to quit and go home and re-engage the problem, be it feature or bug, on the morn of the next day when intellectual capabilites are at their strongest and what would have normally have been a task that would have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3 hours to finish then would now only take 30-45 minutes and the quality of the work done with a fresh mind would be superior to that of a worn out fatigued programmer that only by shear brute ability forced his way through getting it done at the end of the day and at the cost of quality. And this behavior is encouraged because it demonstrates the level of personal sacrifice, determination, drive, ambition, and dedication to the product thereby effecting moral of the entire company as the efforts of such a deed reverberate through the company grapevine. This idiotic behavoir is appreciated by the rest of dilluted idiots working in the same environment and reinforces the level of pride that the rest of the employees have regarding working long hours as a demonstration of their level of stupendous commitment....and by stupendous I mean stupid because that's exactly what game developers are...wait did I just say that game developers, which a lot of are software engineers, are stupid? yes...game developers are stupid.

Take a software engineer out of his element and he is a fucking dumbass. Of course he can program but you have to realize that this person has basically been dedicating all of his time(life) to becoming a more proficient programmer by doing nothing but programming all the time...of course he is going to get good at it even if he is of average intelligence. What is interesting to note is that in the white paper there is a generalization made that, "Game-making is one of the most difficult technology-related creative endeavors in the world." I think that they are embellishing a little bit here but the next part of it is actually quite accurate: "Asking people to perform at their highest levels when they haven't had enough sleep, haven't had a weekend to themselves in weeks/months and are just plain burnt out on the project is clearly nonsenical." Yeah...no fucking shit...seems obvious now doesn't it? Unfortunately it isn't when you are in the fucking trenches trying to ge the shit done...sad isn't it?

Anyway the point of the whole paper is to have the game industry realize that they really don't have a fucking clue as to what they are doing and to be smarter about how they proceed in the future. Will this happen? Who the fuck knows...check out the white paper though it is quite fucking good and I shall endevaor to post some follow ups on this matter because I really need to meter myself in terms of what I post because I could probably write a book on this subject...so I'll just stop here...

[mistasparkle*]

I think that kind of corporate culture is pretty strong in game companies, but you'll find the same culture in slightly different variations at regular software companies. I had that kind of experience working for a software company at the height of the .com hysteria.... pulling all-nighters for weeks at a time. "in the trenches" was an often coined term. The only difference was that people were motivated less by company pride than they were by their truckload of stock options (which after all turned out to be worth less than the paper contract they're written on)



why not write a book about your experience? You've already written enough threads on this forum to fill three books. hehe.

[spidermonkey]

It's not about how much stock you have. It's about how much copper wire you can get out of the walls.

[N3ur0n0saurusl2exs0r!!!]

its based on unhealthy beleifs or overly intrusive intolerant judgement that borders on lifestyle discrimination because someone may have a different idea about what is acceptable. And the determination concerning what is acceptable is based on dellusion devoid of sensible logic.

A lot of what I have experienced corporate culture to be has ended up being strongly rooted in arrogance as well...This will further blur the truth and muddle perception especially when emotions become involved. Some statements may end up bringing out irrational behavior because of the high level of pride and sensitivity associated with a project. I have had this happen during attempts to explain my more comprehensive views on what the reality of any given situation was. I really used to think that I was just being pessimistic or negative and being a whiner/complainer where there was no real value to anything that I had to say but over time I learned that not to be the case and now that I know my views are not unique as evidenced by this white paper I am a more sane person now than ever before!

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

mistasparkle*

why not write a book about your experience? You've already written enough threads on this forum to fill three books. hehe.

Actually it's more about raw volume of text...because J3RK has posted more than anyone...or has he? I took some sample statistics from the "Admiral McNevin Approaches" thread since that is a good comparison between how J3RK has more posts but I post more... check this:

J3RK: 27 posts totalling 5619 bytes
(average post = 209 bytes)

l2icks0r! & l)runken l2icks0r: 12 posts totalling 11215 bytes
(average post = 935 bytes)

so based on average post size I'm posting 4.47 times as much...and so if I divided my posts into smaller consecutive posts using an average 209 bytes per post size I would have had 7194 posts by now...maybe I could fill four books?